Engineering Social Concepts: Labels and the Science of Categorization

One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch’s insights contain important lessons for which kind of ameliorative proposals in endeavors of conceptual engineering are feasible. I do this by highlighting one overlooked upshot of Rosch’s work, namely, that that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, the existence of labeling practices make any ameliorative objective to ‘engineer away’ stereotypes from our conceptual practices potentially unobtainable. And while several intervention techniques might be proposed to overcome this limitation, all of them, I show, come with feasibility problems on their own. It might not be possible for us to engineer the undesirable stereotypes that shape our conceptual practices away.